7

The See Yup Man

A SEE YUP MAN (Courtesy of Hawaii State Archives)

In appearance he looked like any other Chinaman, wore the ordinary blue cotton blouse and white drawers of the Sampan coolie, and, in spite of the apparent cleanliness and freshness of these garments, always exhaled that singular medicated odor—half opium, half ginger—which we recognized as the common “Chinese smell.”

—Bret Harte, “See Yup” ¹

CHANG APANA DID not incur any direct loss in the 1900 fire. He was living on Morris Lane, outside of the burn zone. But China town was the epicenter of activity for the roughly 25,000 Chinese living in Hawaii at the time. Apana also knew the neighborhood as a family man, not just as a cop. He enjoyed grocery shopping and going home to cook supper every night after work. The big Chinatown market on Bethel Street was only a few blocks from the police station, and a daily stop for him. Most weekends Apana could be found at Oo Sack Kee Loo, the social club for men from Oo Sack, which was located nearby on Kamakila Lane. It was here that Apana would hold forth, trading stories with other men in the Hsiangshan dialect. Like Charlie Chan, Apana was a teetotaler. But he loved tobacco, Chesterfield being his preferred brand. Blowing smoke rings and sipping a cup of tea, he would listen as others read newspapers to him, catching up on the news from China. After the Chinatown fire, such places were no more. Rebuilding their foundations took far more than timber and brick. Another year would pass before the social life and the network of associations for the immigrants could be revived.²

Apana’s first marriage was to a Chinese woman, a union that produced a daughter. Both the wife and the daughter, who have remained anonymous in the broken trail of records, went back to China at some point and would never return. According to friends and relatives, Apana would continue to send them money as long as he lived.³

Several years later, he married again, this time to one of the sisters of the half-Chinese, half-Hawaiian Lee Kwai family. Since 1882, the exclusionary immigration policies in the United States had created a predominantly bachelor society of Chinese Americans. The ratio of Chinese men to women in 1900 was a lopsided 36 to 1.⁴ That same year in Hawaii, only 10 percent of the 18,595 Chinese men had wives living with them, while 20 percent had wives in China, who were not allowed to emigrate.⁵ Faced with such a reality, some Chinese men resorted to polygamy, taking common-law wives in China and in the United States, as did Apana.

Apana and his second wife had three daughters: Helen, Victoria, and Cecilia. But his wife died soon after Cecilia’s birth, leaving Apana devastated. Though not a particularly handsome man, Apana had undeniable charisma, and his plight garnered the sympathy of the younger Lee Kwai sister, Annie. Apana’s marriage to Annie would last until his death.

At the Honolulu Police Department, Apana was secretly known to his colleagues as “the See Yup Man,” the cover he used for sting operations. His small physical stature and unassuming looks were an asset that allowed him to blend in. But it was his skill at disguise and his insider’s knowledge of Chinatown that made him indispensable during the department’s drive to clean up criminal activity bred in newly built neighborhoods and beyond.

Under the leadership of High Sheriff Arthur Brown, Apana worked closely with Deputy High Sheriff Charles Chillingworth, an old-time haole born and raised in Hawaii, and Arthur McDuffie, who was later promoted to chief of detectives. One of the major vices that the police were charged with stamping out was gambling, which happened to be a favorite pastime of many Chinese. It is not an exaggeration to say that even today we Chinese will place a bet on anything. From lottery tickets to card games, anything that involves probability and luck ties into the deep-seated connection between the Chinese psyche and numeracy. Apana’s fellow Chinese would even loiter around a fruit hawker’s stand and wager on the number of pips in a mandarin orange.⁶ The loser would have to pay for the fruit to be shared and devoured, to the winner’s satisfaction and the peddler’s delight. The peddler might even have a side bet with the shill.

In Chinatown, gambling parlors were as ubiquitous as flies around an outhouse, and proprietors of these rabbit warrens had ingenious ways of foiling police raids. Gamblers at a King Street joint, for instance, had repeatedly eluded capture. Every time the police stormed into this three-story tenement building, they found the gambling room on the top floor as empty as last year’s bird nest. On the night of May 20, 1904, the police finally received a tip from an informer and prepared to bust the secret den. This time, the raiding squad split in two, with some men remaining on the first floor and the others heading upstairs. As usual, they found the upstairs room deserted, except for a couple of Chinese sitting calmly, grinning like josses in a temple. One of them even tossed the raiders a Cantonese-accented taunt: “Ya alight, boss?” Their glee was short-lived. A commotion erupted from downstairs. The police on the first floor got full bags as the gamblers slid down a chute through a secret trap door, right into the arms of the officers.⁷

Not always were the police so successful; they needed insider knowledge of all the tricks and stunts that gamblers might pull. This was how Apana became one of the HPD’s first undercover cops. Posing as a “See Yup Man” was his favorite disguise. In an 1898 story titled “See Yup,” the novelist Bret Harte, who had made a career out of caricaturing the Chinese, speculated on the etymology of the singsong name of his protagonist:

I don’t suppose that his progenitor ever gave him that name, or, indeed, that it was a name at all; but it was currently believed that—as pronounced “See Up”—it meant that lifting of the outer angle of the eye common to the Mongolian. On the other hand, I had been told that there was an old Chinese custom of affixing some motto or legend—or even a sentence from Confucius—as a sign above their shops, and that two or more words, which might be merely equivalent to “Virtue is its own reward,” or “Riches are deceitful,” were believed by the simple Californian miner to be the name of the occupant himself. Howbeit, “See Yup” accepted it with the smiling patience of his race, and never went by any other.⁸

Harte’s explanation, though colorful, is as believable as a three-dollar bill.

The moniker actually originated from Cantonese. The Hawaiian Chinese generally came from a few districts of Canton Province, including the four often lumped together under the name “See Yup” (meaning, literally, “four districts”): Tai Shan, Xin Hui, En Ping, and Kai Ping. Around the turn of the century, See Yup Men made up more than half the arrivals in Hawaii, and they engaged in professions as diverse as tradesmen, contract labor, laundrymen, and restaurant workers.⁹ What stood out in the public’s eye, however, was the unique image of the See Yup Man as a street peddler who dangles two baskets of goodies on either end of his shoulder pole. Hawking such wares as fruits, candies, fish, and household items, a See Yup Man was essentially an itinerant merchant who enjoyed the flexibility of a movable kiosk but had to walk long miles and shoulder the weight of his goods. The more he sold, the lighter his burden and the merrier his heart. Coming from a neighboring district but speaking a slightly different dialect, Apana loved to impersonate a See Yup Man in order to uncover the secrets in Chinatown’s nefarious underworld.

As described in the prologue, Apana’s bravado was displayed on the night of July 12, 1904, when he singlehandedly arrested forty gamblers in one such sting operation. He had reportedly cased the joint for days by dressing as a See Yup Man, circling the blocks and pretending to hawk his wares. On that particular night, he had to walk through four doors and pass four watchmen before reaching the upstairs room. “Apana, like other members of the raiding force at the police station,” read the newspaper article about his exploits, “is now so well known that it is impossible for him to go anywhere, at night, in Chinatown undisguised without Chinese missing the cry of ‘cop.’ The Chinese have posted various men, whose business is to know by sight every known police officer and informer, to watch the entrance to gambling resorts and on the approach of the police raise the alarm in time.”¹⁰

To the crime bosses in Honolulu, bullwhip-toting Chang Apana was a veritable thorn in their side. They slept restlessly, plagued by the need to get rid of this wiry, tenacious Chinaman. As George Kelai, a former HPD officer who had once worked with Apana, recalled in a later interview, “They threaten his life. They wanna kill him because he was spoiling lotta business.”¹¹ Apana once climbed up walls like a pre–Spider-Man sleuth and slipped into an opium dive in the rear of a tenement building on Pauahi Street. The dark room was over-crowded with Chinese dopers. Some, lying in double bunks with their heads and shoulders propped up on pillows, were busy inhaling the bubbling dope’s blue fumes through bamboo pipes. Others were sleeping off their debauches, dreaming of Elysium. In corners, on the matted floors, or even under the bunks, these poppy-soaked figures, emaciated and ragged, filled every inch of the room, reeking of stink and squalor.¹²

Apana’s surprise entrance did not disturb any of the euphoric dopers, but it did catch the attention of the dive’s proprietor and his hired guards. Among the latter was a notorious character named Pak Chew, aka “the man with a rubber stomach.” Well trained in martial arts, Chew was said to be able to poke his forefinger through a half-inch board and to crack open a coconut with his bare fist. His biggest stunt was to let anyone make a punching bag out of his stomach; even the most determined puncher would fail to make him blink. On this day, Chew and other hatchetmen were ready for Apana. Using the darkness as cover, four of them snuck up on Apana from behind. The ensuing scuffle woke the dopers and sent them running for the door. A table went over and dark opium wads flew out of a tray, scattering like ping-pong balls on the floor. Apana tried to fight off the strangle-hold of Chew’s claws while dodging the punches raining down from the other assailants. He finally freed one hand and reached for the bullwhip coiled around his waist. When his opponents saw the dreaded weapon, they fought desperately to subdue him. Together they grabbed Apana, who weighed only 130 pounds, lifted him up, and hurled him out the second-floor window. Miraculously, Apana landed on his feet and walked away like the proverbial cat.¹³

A few days later, a scene unfolded on the dock just after sunset. A few swimmers still dallied in the water that minutes before had shone with the last rays of a golden dusk. A slice of moon now hovered in the corner of the sky. A See Yup Man, seemingly reluctant to call it a day, hung around the pier, dangling two baskets of coconuts on a bamboo shoulder pole. With an oversize straw hat covering most of his face, he wore a sweat-stained blue shirt and a pair of soiled trousers, a man indistinguishable from Chang Apana undercover. A cargo ship had just arrived from Hong Kong, and the HPD had received a tip that there was contraband aboard.

A team of stevedores were coming down the planks, carrying heavy boxes on their backs. Throwing off his disguise, Apana walked toward the stacked boxes. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a horse and buggy charging at him. It came too fast to dodge, and he was knocked to the ground. As the wheels caught him underneath the carriage, he lost consciousness. The police squad arrived just in time to seize the contraband and arrest the smugglers who had made the attempt on Apana’s life. And the See Yup Man survived, with broken ribs and legs, to fight another day.